Civic Innovations

Technology, Government Innovation, and Open Data

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  • The Philadelphia Experiment

    Three years ago next month, the City of Philadelphia’s open data portal was launched by local technology firm Azavea as part of the inaugural Philly Tech Week. Two years ago next month, Philadelphia joined the small (but growing) fraternity of cities to adopt a formal open data policy – a milestone that stands as one…

  • APIs : To Charge or Not to Charge

    There’s a discussion starting on the U.S. Government API Google Group on the subject of charging for the use of government APIs. This is an interesting discussion (one that governments should pay attention to as they develop their API strategies) and is a nice follow up to my last post on sustainable civic technology. Clearly…

  • On Sustainable Civic Technology

    Sustaining civic technology will mean that both government’s IT infrastructure and the civic technology sector that builds on it will need to change. A pair of recent blog posts caught my eye and highlighted this theme in my head, and motivated me to capture a few thoughts on this topic. The first post was by…

  • The Problem with Public Data

    Governments make a wealth of data available on their public websites. Forward thinking governments have take steps to ensure that more and more of this information is available in open formats. But the majority of the data available on government websites – even those with formal open data policies, like Philadelphia – is not open.…

  • 5 Minute REST API

    Inspired by one of Waldo Jaquith’s recent projects to create an easy solution for converting data into a REST API, I wanted to try doing the same thing with a bit of a different approach. Below is a quick screencast demonstrating how to take a CSV file and convert it into a powerful, flexible REST…

  • Don’t Hang Any Pictures

    A few lessons learned and insights gained serving as a municipal Chief Data Officer – I hope this will be of value to anyone interested in starting an open data program. Helping to create an open data culture in government is a process, not an outcome. It takes time. Though it may sometimes seem easier…

  • Turning Government Web Content Into APIs.

    Inspired by a recent Open City project that repurposes data on sewage in the Chicago River, I wanted to work through a quick example of turing a web page that houses useful information on water quality in Philly into an API. Here is a quick screencast showing how easy it is to take information rendered…

  • 5 Essential Open Data Tools

    Every data wrangler has their own list of favorites – the go to tools that they use when they need to work with data. If you need to clean, transform, or mashup data or if you are working with a data set that will form the basis for an application, here is a list of…

  • Onboarding Civic Hackers

    Earlier this week, I had the pleasure of attending a civic hacking event jointly organized by Code for Philly and Girl Develop It Philly. The event had a tremendously good turnout – over 50 people by my count – making it one of the larger events Code for Philly has organized in recent months. The…

  • The Internal Benefits of External Data

    2013 was a big year for municipal open data, but I think 2014 will be even bigger. Last year saw the development of an interesting dialog on open data focused on the proper goals for government open data programs. With their roots in transparency efforts, a growing number of people observed that open data programs…